Maven Book 0.5: Flex Chapter & PDF Improvements

More readable PDF content. – Typography makes a huge difference to the readability and usability of a text like Maven: The Definitive Guide, and this edition marks a series of editions that are going to focus on bringing the PDF format of this book up to the level of the printed, post-production version of the book. In this release:

Font was reduced to 11 point from 14 point. In addition to saving a few trees, this makes the book easier to read.

Page margins reduced to 0.3 inches. Again, if you look at an old version of the PDF, you’ll see that the margins were all over the place and the page wasn’t even centered.

More sophisticated table layout. As this books develops, I expect it to grow more “useful” tables than we have now. The FlexMojos chapter is full of long reference tables for each plugin goal, and we’re stating to get more sophisticated about table layout in the PDF.

First Version of FlexMojos Chapter Completed – Chapter 20 covers the FlexMojos plugin and how you can use Apache Maven to compile, document, test, and build Flex applications. FlexMojos just recently had a 3.2.0 release which added more support for unit testing, and the next FlexMojos release 3.3.0 is going to emphasize unit test coverage reports. The first draft of the Flex chapter covers everything you need to know about configuring your development environment for Flex to using the FlexMojos archetype to start a new Flex project in Maven.